Building a Poor Man’s Vercel: Deploy Any Framework to AWS in Under $5/month Last week, Vercel quoted me $20/month for a simple portfolio site that gets 1000 visits per day. GitHub Pages couldn’t handle my Next.js API routes. Netlify’s build minutes vanished in 3 days. So I built my own Vercel clone on AWS. It handles Next.js (with ISR), Nuxt, SvelteKit, and even Remix. Total cost? $3.50/month. Here’s exactly how to build a production-ready deployment platform that rivals Vercel’s features without the price tag. ...

AWS Lambda VPC Configuration: The Complete Guide to Private Networking and Cost Optimization with NAT Instances Three months ago, I got a $400 AWS bill that made me question everything I knew about serverless architecture. The culprit? NAT Gateways supporting Lambda functions that barely handled 10,000 requests per month. That’s when I learned the hard way that “serverless” doesn’t mean “cheap” when you need proper networking. After weeks of deep-diving into VPC configurations, NAT alternatives, and cost optimization, I cut our Lambda networking costs by 85% while maintaining security and performance. Here’s everything I learned about running Lambda functions in VPCs the cost-effective way. ...

React Server Components: The Deep Dive Nobody Told You About (With Production Patterns) Six months ago, I migrated a 200k LOC React application to Server Components. What started as a performance optimization turned into a complete architectural paradigm shift. Today, I’m sharing the patterns, gotchas, and mental models that took me months to figure out. This isn’t another “RSC basics” tutorial. This is about the real implementation details, the edge cases that bit me in production, and the patterns that actually scale. ...

WebAssembly in 2025: Why Every Frontend Developer Should Care (And How to Get Started) Three years ago, I dismissed WebAssembly as “something for game developers” and “too complex for regular web apps.” Last month, I used it to cut our image processing pipeline from 2.3 seconds to 180ms. My perspective has completely changed. WebAssembly isn’t just for games anymore. It’s becoming essential for modern web applications, and the tooling has finally reached a point where frontend developers can actually use it without a PhD in systems programming. ...

Why I Ditched Docker Desktop and You Should Too: A Complete Guide to Alternatives in 2025 After Docker Desktop crashed my M2 MacBook for the third time this week while eating 4GB of RAM to run a simple Node.js container, I finally had enough. That breaking point led me down a rabbit hole of Docker alternatives that honestly should have happened years ago. Here’s what I discovered after testing every major Docker Desktop alternative, complete with performance benchmarks, migration headaches, and brutally honest takes on what actually works. ...

AI Code Editors Showdown: Cursor vs Windsurf vs GitHub Copilot - Which One Will 10x Your Productivity? The year is 2025, and if you’re still coding without an AI assistant, you’re essentially bringing a knife to a gunfight. But with Cursor hitting $25M ARR, Windsurf exploding to 40,000 weekly active developers in just 30 days, and GitHub Copilot powering millions of developers worldwide - which AI code editor should you actually use? ...

Zero to Production: Deploy a Full-Stack App with SST and AWS in 60 Minutes In 2025, deploying production-ready applications shouldn’t require weeks of DevOps work. Today, I’ll show you how to build and deploy a full-stack serverless application in just 60 minutes using SST (Serverless Stack) v3, the framework that’s revolutionizing how we build on AWS. What We’re Building We’ll create a real-time collaborative todo application with: Backend: Serverless API with Lambda and API Gateway Database: DynamoDB for scalable data storage Authentication: AWS Cognito for secure user management Frontend: React app with real-time updates Hosting: S3 and CloudFront for global distribution The best part? Everything is type-safe, from infrastructure to API calls. ...